CSS Fonts

CSS Fonts

In this lecture we learn about css fonts. The CSS font properties define the font family, boldness, size, and the style of a text.

CSS Font Families

In CSS, there are two types of font family names:

generic family a group of font families with a similar look (like “Serif” or “Monospace”)

font family a specific font family (like “Times New Roman” or “Arial”)

The font family of a text is set with the font-family property. The font-family property should hold several font names as a “fallback” system. If the browser does not support the first font, it tries the next font, and so on.

Start with the font you want, and end with a generic family, to let the browser pick a similar font in the generic family, if no other fonts are available.

Note: If the name of a font family is more than one word, it must be in quotation marks, like: “Times New Roman”.

More than one font family is specified in a comma-separated list:

p { font-family: “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;}

Font Style

The font-style property is mostly used to specify italic text.

This property has three values:

normal The text is shown normally

italic The text is shown in italics

oblique The text is “leaning” (oblique is very similar to italic, but less supported)

Font Size

The font-size property sets the size of the text.

Being able to manage the text size is important in web design. However, you should not use font size adjustments to make paragraphs look like headings, or headings look like paragraphs. Always use the proper HTML tags, like <h1> to <h6> for headings and <p> for paragraphs. The font-size value can be an absolute, or relative size.

Absolute size:

Sets the text to a specified size

Does not allow a user to change the text size in all browsers (bad for accessibility reasons)

Absolute size is useful when the physical size of the output is known

Relative size:

Sets the size relative to surrounding elements

Allows a user to change the text size in browsers

Font Size With Pixels

Setting the text size with pixels gives you full control over the text size:-

h1 {
font-size: 40px;}h2 {
font-size: 30px;}p {
font-size: 14px;}

Note: If you use pixels, you can still use the zoom tool to resize the entire page.

Font Weight

The font-weight property specifies the weight of a font:-

p.normal {
font-weight: normal;}p.thick {
font-weight: bold;}

Font Variant

The font-variant property specifies whether or not a text should be displayed in a small-caps font. In a small-caps font, all lowercase letters are converted to uppercase letters. However, the converted uppercase letters appears in a smaller font size than the original uppercase letters in the text.

p.normal { font-variant: normal;}p.small { font-variant: small-caps;}

All CSS Font Properties

Property

Description

font

Sets all the font properties in one declaration

font-family

Specifies the font family for text

font-size

Specifies the font size of text

font-style

Specifies the font style for text

font-variant

Specifies whether or not a text should be displayed in a small-caps font